The Internet connection to Sri Lanka crashed completey from late Saturday night following major damage to the submarine cable that connects the island to the global network. Sri Lanka Telecom (SLT) sources said that the damage was caused by a ship and that it may take more than 24 hours to repair the cable. In a message to it's users, SLTnet said: "We have lost connectivity to global Internet due to failure in the international submarine cable system. All measures have been taken to normalise this as early as possible."

"An additional but limited capacity satellite uplink has been made to manage the information flow crisis caused by the crash, particularly when people go to their offices, banks universities etc.," SLTnet officials said.

Sri Lanka Telecom's (SLT) connectivity to the outside world is through Mount Lavania landing point of undersea SEA-ME-WE-III (SMW-III, South East Asia- Middle East – Western Europe) fibre optic cable link managed by French and Singapore telecom. The SMW-III network supports 40Gbps bandwidth with two fiber pairs using SDH (Synchronous Digital Hierarchy) covering 41 landing points in 35 countries.